Battlefield 3 and the future.

I’m always up for some competitive play – f ave it

Ave it Lammie!

yep!

Post beneath this

I’ll tidy it then post a wall of text 🙂

I suppose you will probably believe this but i’m sitting now in the au bar with a notepad, and on my 4 th page soshouldn’t disappoint on the mini novel front.

I don’t think there’s anything controversial about this post Ben and I’ve actually been sitting on something similar, only delayed by the DayZ period and now Planetside 2. There’s nothing in what you’ve said that I disagree with so I’ll just give you my own thoughts on where we are and what I’d like to do.

First thing is that because we have all got more responsibilities since the old days, it’s a lot harder now getting sufficient numbers of us together to do anything beyond squadding up, but if you look at the kind of numbers we get on TS during our best days, there are clearly a lot of us still playing games regularly. From your perspective you may not see this as you tend to stick to a later time slot, but even still I’d love to increase that number, and I think recruitment is pretty much the only way to do it.

The problem is how do we go about it because aside from teamwork and knowing each other really well, what does XDC actually offer? I suppose on that you could say that we have facilities in place that help nuture the community we’ve built here, but even there not everyone uses them (TS and the forums), plus we really could do a lot better in that respect, using them to organise events which are so rare that I can count them on my fingers.

Having said that, I think a genuine community is rare online, so it makes me wonder why I ended that last paragraph with a negative tone. Perhaps it’s because XDC feels smaller these days, and smaller still because we we all seem to be pulling in different directions. The hardcore vs proper mode is a case in point, as it’s had the effect of dividing us to the where I’ve questioned whether we’re all as like minded as we like to think.

Reality is though that as time goes on people diverge in opinion and settle on their own styles, and in that we’re no different. We can’t go on constantly dividing the same piece of cake though, or we’ll end up with nothing to work with, so what can we do?
There are two options if we want to grow:

1 – Each go about our own business and recruit into two seperate sections of XDC, gay and straight (you choose ;))

2 – Pool our resources with a common goal in mind, and compromise.

I like option 2, and recently we’ve had a few nights on our server, when in trying to fill it, we may have stumbled upon the solution. There have been maybe 8 to 10 of us online and divided between two teams, and while this has to date failed to fill the server, we’ve really had some outstanding games trying. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the teamwork and competition, and given how long the games have gone on for, I can only assume I was not the only one enjoying it.

Here’s a proposal then, we pick a day (sunday evening maybe?), jump on TS and our server, then either pick teams or let the server decide, plus divide ourselves into seperate channels, then go at each other. We setup the server beforehand with match settings, which means hardcore in all but the damage, and advertise it in the server name. If people join great, if not, we’ll have great games anyway, and that leads me onto the next point, though excuse me as I change the subject slightly first.

If you look at the last few FPS that I’ve played (BF3 and TF2), the biggest and best communities have centred and grown around either podcasts or youtube. No longer, it seems, are forums the centre of community activity, unless in a small group such as ourselves. You still have big forums out there sure, but the community feel of past sites, such as battlefied1942.co.uk and wireplay, is not easily found, if possible at all. We should really consider this going forward because we may have procrastinated here to the point where we’ve fallen behind the curve online.

It’s an ambitious thought, but as I suggested to max the other night and in numerous walls of text to other Ben in work, why not create our own youtube channel? It would certainly be difficult creating something worth listening to or watching, but I’ve seen a lot of channels on youtube where the main man’s only talent is in spouting continuous streams of drivel, yet still achieving subscriber numbers in the thousands! If we could get with the times and start putting what we do on show, it can only create interest, even if it’s just internal, but if external then it’ll only attract people we’ll be interested in ourselves.

If we go back to the idea of matching ourselves against each other in a sunday evening event, why don’t we fraps it to post on youtube, then see what it reaps. We can do this with normal gameplay as well, no matter what the game, and once we get the hang of it, put up our own commentaries. It’s a challenging prospect, but we sell ourselves as team orientated and playing the objects, so that any subscribers we may pick up may be interested enough to join our server when they see activity there.

Most of you will have seen Stalker’s sniper shotgun montages, and as an example of what youtube can achieve, consider that even 6 months later he still sees people joining his games and commenting on what they’ve seen, clearing having tracked him down through battlelog. Could we get the same through a group effort?

There’s also the prospect of new games, such as Planetside 2, which is promising, though I’m still undecided on it’s long term appeal, but also DayZ plus anything else that may appear randomly. BF4 is a year or so away as well, so to get ourselves set in motion down this path can only put us in a better position once it’s released.

It would certainly move us out of the comfort zone we’re currently sitting in, and provide an interesting challenge that may result in a lot of fun along the way.